As some judges in New Orleans disqualify themselves from handling lawsuits over the Deepwater Horizon rig deaths and oil spill, a Houston judge Friday made it clear he's willing and able.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, whom BP lawyers requested by name to oversee pre-trial matters in all the federal lawsuits, met with lawyers on the first case filed in Houston federal court and talked about joining it with other lawsuits.

Hughes told the lawyers that he's handled complex matters before and that he has no conflict like the handful of judges in New Orleans and elsewhere who've recused themselves because of financial holdings or family ties to employees of the defendant companies or lawyers for those companies.

Hughes said he's posted his public financial disclosure on his own court website. Hughes owns some mineral rights and oil company stock but has no interest in the companies involved in the blowout and explosion that killed 11 and is wreaking economic and environmental havoc in the Gulf.

Media reports have noted that Hughes has taken travel money to give speeches for an oil-related geological society. He said he loses money on those trips and that the group is a scientific association, not a trade group.

“The petroleum geologist has done his job in this case,” the judge observed. “There is oil.”

Plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Lanier, who filed the suit that was before the court Friday, one of more than 100 filed since the April 20 blowout, said he's asked that a judge in the Southern District of Texas oversee the cases. He said he'd be happy if Hughes were the judge.

Lanier sued BP, rig owner Transocean and contractors Halliburton and Cameron on behalf of the National Vietnamese American Fisherman Emergency Association.

He said that earlier Friday, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier held a similar hearing in New Orleans talking about the possibility of consolidating the cases before him. Barbier sold Transocean and Halliburton bonds he held so he can stay on the cases without a conflict.

Lawyers seeking whatever advantage they can get in their lawsuits have asked that cases be consolidated before specific judges from Houston, New Orleans and New York and that the cases be moved to courts in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and elsewhere.

It likely will be July before the federal courts' Multidistrict Litigation panel assigns a judge to oversee the pre-trial matters in the Deepwater Horizon cases.